The more context you give an AI tool, the better its answers. The same instinct can lead people to paste in things that should never leave the company. A few simple rules let you get the benefit without the risk.
Information to keep out
- Customer personal data: names with phone numbers, addresses, ID numbers, payment details, health information.
- Passwords and access keys: login details, API keys, tokens and anything else that grants access to a system.
- Confidential business information: unsigned contracts, unpublished financial results, pricing agreements, plans that have not been announced.
- Source code and internal documents, where your company’s policy does not allow them to be shared.
- Other people’s private information, including colleagues’ evaluations and personal messages.
Habits that keep you safe
- Know the policy. Find out which AI tools your organization has approved and what you are allowed to put into them.
- Remove identifying details. Replace real names, numbers and company names with placeholders. The answer is usually just as good.
- Share only what the task needs. Paste the relevant paragraph, not the whole document.
- Check the data settings. See whether the tool keeps your conversations and whether they may be used to train models, and choose the stricter option when one is offered.
- Review before it leaves. Anything AI helps you write is still sent under your name.
When you are not sure
If you would hesitate to email a piece of information to someone outside the company, do not paste it into a tool you have not checked. Ask the person responsible for IT or data protection. A two-minute question is cheaper than a data incident.